A 25-year veteran pilot for LATAM Airlines died about two hours after takeoff from Miami.
The plane was landed in Panama by two co-pilots.
This is why commercial flights have multiple pilots.
He should have had the lasagna.
No, there are many reasons we have multiple pilots before we reach “one of them might die”. This is vanishingly rare.
A few of the more mundane reasons:
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Pilots make mistakes, and having another person there minimizes errors and their consequences.
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All airliners and many smaller planes are certificated by their manufacturers to be flown by multiple pilots.
I’ve been an airline pilot and flown charter. I’m qualified for single-pilot operations in one jet I’ve flown, but I never wanted to do it. I value the presence of another pilot too much, and not because I’m afraid of dropping dead.
After all, if you drop dead the plane isn’t your problem any more.
Here is (an option available for) a single-pilot, single-engine airplane that - if claims are to be believed - can handle the case of a pilot who drops dead.
The typical crew on 9+ hour long-haul by US carriers is one Captain & two FOs. The typical crew on non-US airlines is two Captains and one FO. Really long haul, like ~16 hours Europe to Australia or US to China is typically 4 pilots. The cheaper airlines use one Captain & 3 FOs whereas the less cost-conscious airlines use two of each. I work for the former.
Throughout the operation two are working and the other(s) are resting.
As @Llama_Llogophile said, the day-to-day value of a second pilot is mistake detection and correction, not a spare live body. In the fighter biz we fly single pilot, but at the same time we fly a simplified aviation mission vs. the airlines, and we’re willing to jump out if we get too screwed up. That works less well in Boeings.
So…where did the pilot officially die? Which country?
As long as I’m asking…if a baby is born on an international flight, what country is the child considered to have been born in?
I’d be interested in that too. The last time I flew from Berlin to Brussels the flight was a Lufthansa flight, code sharing with TAP Portugal, something Canadian and a Middle Eastern company, in case that makes the case more interesting.
(Answering to JaneDoe42, as Discourse does not show it is an answer when two posts follow each other with no post in between, which has made replies of mine seem strange or ambiguous in the past)
What’s the difference between a pilot and a FO?
This is important. We need to know not only where he died, but whether the jurisdiction recognizes deathright citizenship to ensure his soul ends up going to the right heaven (or hell). The afterlife is very strict when it comes to immigration and nationality. Coinage is old hat. These days, Charon won’t ferry your soul without a passport, or at least a visa.
I can see where a pilot jumping out and leaving the passengers behind would be frowned upon.
This gets into the fuzziness of colloquial language. And some of this varies a bit by country of registry. I’ll speak to US practice except where noted otherwise.
All cockpit crew are “pilots”. But more below …
The person in charge is the Captain. They’re assisted by the (one) First Officer = “FO”. Much like the Captain and First Mate of a ship. Both are fully capable of operating the machine in the absence of the other. Both go through substantially the same training and have the same government licenses. The difference is mostly one of experience and seniority with their employer. And who is legally the person who signed for the airplane, cargo, & passengers and who’s ass in on the legal line for the $1B contingent liability from a major screwup.
Today my First Officer was a new employee with my company. He had been a Captain for 5 years at his previous employer. But now he’s starting over at the bottom of a bigger better company operating bigger fancier airplanes. In time he’ll be a Captain again.
The term “First Officer” and “co-pilot” are fully interchangeable. Some uses of “pilot” refer to either in the generic, while other uses refer to the Captain as “the pilot” and the FO as “the co-pilot”. News media of course don’t much care for the details and may use any naming standard or none at all. Sometimes you can figure out which they mean from context, and sometimes you’re left guessing.
In the case of the LATAM flight the thread is about, the Captain was the guy who died.
I mentioned upthread that very long flights carry more than 2 pilots of cockpit crew who take turns minding the store. Just like aboard a ship, the real no-kidding Captain is always responsible even when sound asleep. The others spell the Captain and at any given time somebody among the other pilots is the designated on-scene commander to be in charge in the Captain’s absence. Depending on the specifics of which airline from which nation there may be a qualified relief Captain along, or there may just be a gaggle of FOs.
At least in normal operations, the pilots take turns actively flying vs assisting by operating radios and other admin crap. So on about half the flights you’ve ridden on, the Captain is flying assisted by the FO and in the other half the FO is flying while the Captain assists. That’s in keeping with the idea an FO is really an apprentice Captain and the best way for them to learn the job is to do it for real, but with a backstop at the ready. And to act as the ultimate tiebreaker in the event of a disagreement about how to handle a situation.
Clear as mud yet?
You can get around that by quoting a portion of the post your are answering. That way it is clear who (and which part exactly) you are responding to.
That is absolutely the best and clearest thing to do.
Naturally, the usual suspects* are suggesting that the Miami-Santiago pilot died because he was vaccinated against Covid (part of the Pilots Dropping Dead Vaccination Suppression Conspiracy). 56-year-olds don’t just die, ya know.
An online article** mentions someone on the flight reporting that a flight attendant was asking passengers if they had any supplies for a person who was insulin-dependent.
*such as Natural News.
**true, it was the Daily Mail, so it’s just as likely the pilot died in a bullfighting accident.
Actually that helps a lot. Thank you. I watch Mentour Pilot on YouTube and he often (always?) makes a distinction between pilot flying and the pilot monitoring, and either/or can be either the FO or the captain. I’ve yet to watch one of his videos where he describes the difference between a captain and a first officer, so again thanks for explaining that.
A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about the skyborn. At least in some cases, the place of birth is listed as “in the air,” which is analogous to the older “at sea” for those born on a ship in international waters. As for citizenship, the child would normally have the citizenship of its parents. In theory, the child might receive citizenship of the airline’s home country but only if it would otherwise be stateless.
I’ll point out that under US regulations as recently as ~15 years ago FOs did not require the same minimum experience and licensing as Captains. So in many ways they were apprentices still gaining vital experience and skills OJT.
As aviation has gotten busier and more crowded and lotsa other stuff, this led to a spate of accidents caused by barely qualified FOs hauling passengers in RJs. So the regs were changed to require the same minimum licensing and experience for FOs as for Captains.
But the idea persists from the old days in at least some of news media and fictional literature that the FO is barely a competent apprentice, not a journeyman in their own right.
There are eras in the airline industry where there are far too many highly qualified applicants for each of the every, very few open jobs. At one time the wry joke was that the US major airlines would only consider candidates with two lunar landings.
And there are other eras where they can’t hire as many as they want because sufficient people with the licenses and experience simply don’t exist. And can’t be quickly created because it costs serious money and 2-3 years of dedicated mostly unpaid-work to accumulate the minimums. Multiplied by the attrition between [I think I’d like to try this flying stuff] to [I actually have the aptitude, learning ability, and dedication to do this work well enough. And I’m not soured on the career. Yet.]
The US industry has been moving into one of those latter supply-constrained situations for some time. Which will continue for another 5-8, maaaybe even 10 years absent some huge and unlikely Federal effort to create a publicly-funded academy system.
The overseas industry in the rapidly growing parts of the world has it worse. By and large it’s two apprentices with nobody to teach them how to become journeymen. And now they’re into the 5th or 6th generation of “everyone is an apprentice trained by an apprentice”. Gonna be bad. Has been and will be.